smallER

so believe it or not i already have two unfinished blog entries in the hopper about articles in the nytimes that are retarded, but i couldn't let this one slide. "Better Sound in Small Packages" by Michel Marriott, besides having a grammatically questionable title, has factual errors and is basically a shill piece for the consumer electronics and recording industries.

The big error is here: "DVD's have enough storage capacity for an album's worth of uncompressed music on them; CD's require compression, though not as much as MP3's and other formats read by digital audio players." That's just wrong. DVD's may contain higher quality audio by using a higher sampling rate or a higher bit-depth, and they may contain more audio information in the form of surround tracks, but standard audio CD's absolutely do not use any type of audio compression. On top of that, while DVD-audio (which is probably what this article is talking about, but who knows) isn't compressed, the standard DVD format ironically DOES support compressed audio, though I don't know how often it is actually used.

what really gets my goat though is how this article seems to unwittingly shill for the electronics companies. Regardless of what you think of it (and I don't necessarily think much) the triumph of the iPod and mp3 players in general (which DO use compression schemes) is a triumph of consumer preference over audiophile nonsense. The point is that in the market, portability totally trumps fidelity, for the simple reason that most people are listening to most of their music on the street, in the subway, on the bus, in a car, or even on a plane. These are places with a huge amount of noise. if you're really interested in listening on a nice stereo, go buy the CD; you can always rip it to your iPod.

So how is this shilling for the consumer electronics industry? Well, they loooove a format change, because that means everybody has to go out and buy brand new equipment to play their music. and the recording industry loves it to, because then they have to go out and buy all new music so that they can play it on their new equipment! so here's an article all about how horrible all of the music you have now sounds and how you should be keyed up to purchase what they want to sell you instead. honestly, i don't think that it's gonna happen again, what with the advent of the itunes music store etc. of course, that's a format change too.

when you get to the second page of the article, you realize that all of that has just been a set-up for more product shilling, this time for a few dsp processes that make you think your audio sounds better, when in fact all they do is make it sound more impressive. these audio effects have very little to do with the seemingly-misguided studio engineer who asks "Why shouldn't the listener at home hear what I hear in here?" (I don't set out to demean the engineer. I'm sure he does a great job, but the fact is there are very good reasons why, chief among them that they don't really care).

There's a scene in 24 hour party people where tony wilson wants to hear joy division's newly-recorded first single in the car. Another character complains that it will sound like shit in the car, but he replies that that's where most people will hear it so they should make sure it sounds good even there.